R. Buckminster Fuller sculpture to hang in Engineering Centers Building

When the Engineering Centers Building is completed, a massive
stainless-steel-and-wire sculpture designed by visionary
engineer-inventor-artist R. Buckminster Fuller will hang at the
entrance to its atrium. "Sixty-Strut Tensegrity," is a 500-pound,
9-foot "crystal ball" through which admirers can glimpse its creator's
vision of the future, and its donors' memories of the past.

"We donated it in memory of our husband and father," says Leah "Lee"
Temkin of her family's gift. "We wanted something that would be as
special as he was."

The former Lee Sigman met Blair "Bud" Temkin on campus. She was in
letters and science; he was a chemical engineer, and they married in
1949 while Lee was still in school. Eventually she earned an EdD and
taught at Milwaukee Area Technical College, while Bud and his brother
started Port Shell Molding, which became a successful foundry in
Pewaukee, Wisconsin. The couple had a girl and three boys, and shared
48 years before Bud's death in 1998. "Bud was quietly proud of being a
registered professional engineer, and we both felt his engineering
education enhanced our family's lives, so a memorial gift to the
engineering college felt right," says Lee.

Finding "Tensegrity" was serendipitous, she says. "It had been a long
day at a Chicago art show," says Lee. "I almost left, but decided to
walk one last aisle. There the sculpture hung. Both its beauty and the
creative engineering genius of Buckminster Fuller, which it
represented, stunned me. It was an easy choice for our family."

Bud shared many of Fuller's creative qualities, she says. "Because Bud
had a creative, curious and inventive mind--he designed our octagonal
home, made furniture and jewelry, traveled and photographed sites
worldwide--and because Bud loved beauty and the art world, it was
natural to think in terms of an art piece," says Lee about her
family's decision to donate Fuller's work to the college.

Recipient of 47 honorary doctorates (including one from UW-Madison),
holder of more than 20 U.S. patents and author of nearly 30 books,
Fuller is best known for inventing the geodesic dome. He also devised
tensional integrity, or tensegrity. Tensegrity describes a
structural-relationship principle in which each component of an
architectural system stabilizes the others by balancing forces of
compression and tension.

Commissioned by a Dayton, Ohio, bank, Fuller created "Sixty-Strut
Tensegrity" in 1979. From the bank it traveled to the Dayton Art
Museum, where it remained until workers renovating the museum
disassembled the sculpture and stowed it in the basement.

Carl Solway is the Cincinnati, Ohio, gallery proprietor who arranged
the sculpture's commission and acquired it after its basement
exile. He says "Tensegrity" is an illustration of Fuller's concern for
the environment and his commitment to considering the whole
picture. "It is more than a feat of engineering," says Solway. "It is
a symbol for the elements of the universe and how the universe is
mysteriously held together by the forces within it."